Office Insights

Inspiration

Our App Office Insights enables employees to schedule meeting rooms based on their availability using Voice Commands.
Finding meeting rooms and scheduling meetings has always been a challenge for developers who just want to brainstorm and pair program their way to building successful apps.
Also, we wanted the ability to tell folks in a meeting room when their meeting is about to end and book a room available if they needed more time.

What it does

You can look up room availability, locate them, book a room, track an ongoing meeting and request assistance using employee and meeting rooms Microsoft exchange accounts.
All the meeting rooms have microsoft accounts and thats how they are currently booked.

How We built it

The App brings together Amazon Echo, Rasberry Pi, Pi modules and at the heart of everything Microsoft Office.
Echo is controlled using AWS Lambda which takes in the Voice Commands. These commands are relayed to The backend Java app which uses Exchange Web Services as part of Office 365 to Send emails, lookup calendars, map Microsoft accounts to location and much more.

Included an image for the different systems involved. Please do view our demo video.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating all the different systems together was a challenge. Also, getting an admin account in to post calendar invites.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created an excellent example of Internet of Things to make our lives around scheduling meetings at work easier, faster and way more fun.

What I learned

IOT and also how easy it is now to integrate with microsoft APIs. The gateway to office APIs is very useful since most of the companies already have microsoft accounts for employees. Many more apps can be built on top of the office APIs

What's next for Office Insights

Our App will be able to leverage integrating with any Wearable or device that takes voice commands.

Built With

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I primarily worked on building out the Node.js application that sits on our Raspberry Pi, bridging our Spark Photon LED modules with our Java application's endpoints. Additionally I worked heavily on building our custom Alexa Skill for the Amazon Echo and assisted with its deployment.